Preview
THE ROWDYMEN
March 12 and 13
Wildwood
When it comes to fitting in with the crowd and somehow being original at the same time, rockabilly acts often have it the toughest.
On one hand, there’s a whole prerequisite sound and fashion sensibility that’s part and parcel of the rockabilly world. On the other hand, you also have to set yourself apart from the last pompadours that blew through town. It’s a balance that Jason Allen, frontman-guitarist for Winnipeg’s The Rowdymen, has given considerable thought to during the band’s constant touring.
"Down in the States, all the rockabilly people seem to drive ’49 Mercs and live the entire lifestyle. It’s not just about the music and up in Canada it seems to be coming to that now," says Allen. "Every time we go out there’s more people who dress that way, live the entire lifestyle. I don’t have a ’49 Mercury... I’m interested in all of that but I don’t obsess with it."
What he is obsessed with is fine-tuning his band’s sound and zeroing in on the sound of a bygone era’s – in Allen’s humble estimation – greatest musicians. Greats like Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochrane and Elvis Presley during his Sun Records days have long formed the fundamental building blocks of the Rowdymen’s music. Since the days of their first release, Rowdy Duty, an album Allen describes as "more of a rock and roll album" but "deeply planted in rockabilly," the Rowdymen have slowly shed guitarists and converted from electric bass to the tried-and-true standup bass, much to the pleasure of their longtime fans. Now a trim three piece, Allen feels the band is finally the way he and bass player/co-founder Rob Zaporzan intended from the beginning. "We’re trying to get as authentic as possible," he says.
Of course, that puts a band in danger of being like all the other cats aspiring to sound like they came out of Sam Phillips’s Sun Records studio, the Mecca of rockabilly that Allen – like many musicians that worship those early days of rock and roll – ecstatically visited while touring through Tennessee. But the way around that, says Allen, is to take it easy on the clichés one can easily fall into when focusing on a specific time and geographical area. Instead, they try to be just what they are – which is definitely not a band from Tennessee circa 1957. At all times, The Rowdymen remember that they are from Winnipeg and draw their inspiration from what’s around them. "Yeah, we don’t try to pretend we’re from somewhere else," says Allen.
It’s an approach that works. The Rowdymen’s current album Rubberneckin’ is a tight, polished rave-up landing right on the mark – from the driving beat of the opening track "The Old Hereafter," to the honky-tonk oozing "Skinny Little Town." It’s obvious that digging into Allen’s childhood in the tiny town of Gimli, Manitoba, or the boredom of kicking around a city plunked in the middle of the prairies can yield songs with meaning for Memphis natives and Canucks alike. Topped up with shimmering guitars, snappy drums and Allen’s dead-on twang it’s a package that’s hard to resist. Which explains why things are going so well for the Rowdymen these days.
"We’ve kind of gone through a rebuilding phase where the band, in the last month or so, is stronger than it’s ever been before," says Allen. Good rockabilly bands aren’t the most common thing on the Canadian landscape and the boys are having no trouble playing for a living. What little time Allen has left is being poured into an all-Winnipeg Guess Who tribute (he’s called dibs on "Clap for the Wolfman") to be released on Transistor 66, The Rowdymen’s home-town label. Allen adds that wrapping his head around such an undertaking, while simultaneously honing the sound of a band that is one of the brighter lights in its respective scene, has proved to be a damn fine post-secondary education. "I’ve learned more in the last three years than I did in the previous 20." |
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